Could you write a speech consisting of nothing but questions?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Is that possible? Yes! I found a pair of commencement speeches where rather than provide answers they only had questions. One was given in 2019 by David Glaser at Tufts University. It is described in an article by Joel Abrams at The Conversation on May 16, 2019 titled This commencement speech had nothing but questions. A second, last year for the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University, is described in another article by Fred Sanders at LeadingWithQuestions on July 20, 2023 titled A Few Questions For You.

 

What about poems or songs? William Blake’s 1794 poem The Tyger just is questions. And in her 2023 album A Great Wild Mercy Carrie Newcomer has a song titled A Book of Questions. You can watch a five-minute lyric video for it on YouTube. (The brief chorus is not questions).

 

How about an entire novel consisting of questions? I have two examples with excerpts at Google Books. From 2001 there is Gold Fools by Gilbert Sorrentino. And from 2009 there is The Interrogative Mood by Padgett Powell. The Kirkus Reviews article on The Interrogative Mood opens by whining that:

 

“This novel a one-trick pony, and that trick is a question mark.”

 

How did I get started on this offbeat topic? At the public library I got Dwight Garner’s 2023 book The Upstairs Delicatessen. On page 108 he says:

 

“Powell wrote a 164-page novel, The Interrogative Mood, in which every sentence is a question. (Sample: ‘Have you decided yet which historical moment you would most like to have witnessed with your own eyes and ears?’) The form suited Powell, because he’s one of the most inquisitive writers we have.”

  

An image of a head full of questions was adapted from one at Openclipart.